The present invention relates to the garment rental business. More particularly it relates to a system and method of streamlining the cleaning, sorting and return process of a uniform rental operation.
The uniform rental business is a substantial industry that provides a product and service for many companies that use uniforms. Restaurants, manufacturing companies, research or analysis laboratories, repair service companies and a wide variety of other companies are among those companies that require some or all of their employees to ware a uniform for safety, image or any number of other reasons. Many companies pay for the cost of the uniforms or special garments they require their employees to wear. For companies that do supply the uniform or garments for their employees the almost universal practice is to contract with a company that specializes in the uniform rental business. Such companies not only supply the necessary uniforms made and designed pursuant to the specifications of the employer but they also periodically pick up the soiled uniforms from the employer, clean the uniforms and return them to the employer on a periodic basis, such as every week etc. A profitable uniform rental business requires a substantial operation that handles a large number of customers (companies that require employees to wear uniforms) to be profitable. Generally, the customers are located over a fairly wide geographical area that requires multiple pick up and delivery routes. Additionally, each customer can have from several to hundreds of employees (wearers) who must wear the required uniform.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram that depicts the current state of the art in use in the uniform rental business for the process of cleaning and returning rental uniforms to customers. In the current practice companies that rent and clean a large number of uniforms or work related garments for various customers combined all of the garments together from various sources, i.e., customers and routes, and clean them together upon their arrival from the various routes 23. The dirty garments, when they first arrive, are sorted, generally according to type of textile and dirt or soiling the garments had on them 25. The purpose for doing this is to wash the garments according to the type of textile and soil or dirt the garment has on it. This is due to the fact that the type of soil or dirt on the garment may dictate the type of cleaning process necessary.
After the garments were cleaned, they then were sent on to the xe2x80x9ctunnel or pressesxe2x80x9d 27 for a drying and finishing process. In the tunnel the garments are dried by heat and blown air in such a fashion that most the wrinkles fall out of the garments. Upon leaving the tunnel or presses the garments are then sent through a two-step sorting process (some times three steps) to reassemble the garments by routes and customers on each route for redelivery to the customer. This process generally takes two days, a day being needed for each sorting step. The first sorting step 31 involves sorting the garments according to their routes. Each garment will typically have a tag, not shown, which identifies the customer and wearer from which the route can be determined. The tag can alternatively have the route identification on it. At the first sort stage a person will usually visually inspect the tag 33 and then place it in the rack of the correct route 35. At the second sort step 37 each routes garments are then be sorted according to customers on that route and wearers at each customer. Some operations might break the second sort into a second sort by customer on each route and then a third sort by wearer at each customer.
Whether this two or three step sorting process is done by hand or is partially or fully automated using bar codes, radio frequency identification tags on the garments or some other identification system, the process is expensive and time consuming. In fact such a process can add up to a day or more to the cleaning and return process.
Thus, what is needed is a system and method for streamlining the sorting and returning process for the uniform rental business; a system that can be implemented within the context of a wide variety of current uniform rental cleaning and return operations without the need for expensive equipment upgrades or new equipment.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an efficient and expeditious method for a commercial laundry operation to clean rented uniforms or work related garments for a large number of customers. It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method that can be easily integrated into the operation of a commercial laundry or uniform rental operation in an efficient, timely and cost effective manner.
The present invention accomplishes these and other objectives by providing a method for sorting and sequencing of garments in a just in time flow (no buffer or backlog allowed) from a multitude of sources, located on a plurality of routes, for cleaning and return to the original source of each specific garment collected, the method having the steps of: collecting a multitude of garments from a multitude of sources along a plurality of routes; cleaning the garments while retaining them in identifiable collections; putting the garments through a drying process sequenced according to their specific routes; sorting each routes garments by customer and wearer upon completion of the drying process; and wherein since the integrity of an identifiable group of garments from each specific route has been maintained all of the garments from a specific route can be quickly reassembled according to their specific route at any point during the process and thereby eliminate the need for sorting individual garments on a route by route basis.
In a further aspect of this invention it provides a method with the additional steps of sorting the garments according to type of soil on each garment for a cleaning process designed to clean that type of soil from the garment; segregating into retained identifiable collections during the sorting step garments from each specific route for cleaning according to type of soil; and cleaning according to type of soil the garments from several different routes together in their retained identifiable collections by route so that garments form each of the routes do not become mixed with garments from other routes.